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  Still, he insists on showing me what he has done and then sharing whatever it is with me. If I have ice cream, we can have a feast and then work out together to get rid of the evidence, he says.

  I hang up the phone and meet him in the hallway on the stairs, midway between his apartment and mine. I am anxious to see what the big surprise is. I don’t think he is prepared for the way my face shuts down and my smile slides sideways. It turns into something ugly and obscene. I feel my bowels loosen and I clench my ass cheeks together to keep from losing myself all over the stairs. I push the pan away from me, back to him, and he notices that I am falling apart right before his eyes.

  “Lena?” he says softly. His face shows concern.

  “No. Get that shit away from me.”

  “Baby, what’s wrong? They’re just brownies. I didn’t—”

  “Fucking brownies,” I roar like a dragon. My voice fills the hallway and bounces off the walls around us. I breathe fire and brimstone. I shape-shift into the biggest, brownest, ugliest bear at the zoo and keep roaring. “I don’t want that shit! How the fuck could you think I’d want brownies? Fucking brownies?”

  “Lena, I don’t understand. What did I do? Tell me what I did.” He never raises his voice, and that hits me the wrong way. He thinks I am insane, speaks to me like he works on a psych ward and I am an uncontrollable patient. Calm and soothing is not what I need right now.

  Aaron tries to hold on to the pan and reach for me at the same time, but anger gives me speed. I slap his hand down and slap the pan out of his hand. It hits the floor. Brownies fly all over the place and land on the floor at our feet. I stomp them like a maniac, grind them into the floor until I am breathless and spent, and then I leave him standing there, calling my name.

  I don’t go back to his apartment for two days, and when I finally do, we don’t talk about what happened or why.

  This is what he says when he opens the door and sees me standing there holding a pan of apple turnovers, still warm from the oven: “I want to write your story.”

  He takes the pan, sniffs appreciatively, and smiles. All is forgiven. He snatches up a turnover, eats half of it in one bite and offers me the rest. I push his hand away. “I don’t eat sweets,” I say, smiling back. “Sorry about your brownies. They made me sick to my stomach.”

  “You didn’t even taste them.”

  We lock eyes. “They made me sick to my stomach.”

  “Past experience?”

  “Past experience.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “It’s not about trust. It’s about boundaries and peace of mind. Some things are better off being left for dead.”

  “Your story might inspire someone, Lena. Might help the next person going through the same thing.”

  “You don’t know anything about my story. You don’t have a clue.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Ignorance is bliss in this case.”

  He is about to say something but then he thinks better of it. He takes his sweets to the kitchen and comes back to me. “I want to show you something. Come.”

  In his office, Sophia is already booted up and ready to roll. Since I performed open-heart surgery on her, she is reborn. I think I see her smile as Aaron pulls up his chair and settles himself in front of her. It’s a tired smile though. He will still have to give her a decent burial before too many more moons come and go. I stand behind him and wait to see what he has to show me.

  He accesses the Internet and types my name in the search box. My hands land on his shoulders and my nails dig in. I moan disgustedly when I see that he has his choice of several responses to click on. My story is everywhere it shouldn’t be, and now he has it. He selects the first choice, a newspaper article from over eight years ago, and I see my picture unfold on the screen. I stare at myself and try to place it. I think it is a professional portrait of me and Beige, with Beige photoshopped out of the image.

  “You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”

  Aaron studies the picture. Looks over his shoulder and catches my eyes. “Ignorance is not bliss, Lena. This shit makes you seem like a monster, and I don’t think that’s who you really are.”

  “You have no idea who I really am.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” My voice rises and takes us into argument territory. “You didn’t even know me six months ago and now you want to know everything about me. You want to know things I don’t tell anybody. Things that aren’t your business to know. Why do you give a shit who I am and what I’m about?”

  “I think you’ve got a story to tell.” It’s simple for him. As easy as one, two, three.

  It’s as hard as eight, nine and ten for me. “You don’t get paid to think.”

  “Who doesn’t want a book written about them?”

  “I don’t, that’s who. I don’t need you digging around in my business.”

  “You’re saying you don’t care about telling your side of the story?”

  I have his number, and the look I give him tells him as much. “Oh no, you’re not twisting me up with that shit. Forget it.”

  “How many times will you say shit before you think up another curse word to toss around?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Try another one because that one’s not working for us right now.”

  I look at him. I mean really look at him. I see the same things I always see, but they come at me differently with the introduction of new tension in the room. He is not someone to glance at and forget about. He is a man who makes a woman do a double take, makes her pause somewhere in the flow of her conversation and take a moment to ponder and appreciate. Makes her look for a wedding ring and flirt when she sees none.

  But I don’t do any of those things because I tell myself it isn’t like that between us. Nothing happens to me when I see him, when our eyes catch each other’s and hold on. We are easy with each other because I look past his eyes. They are the color of melted chocolate and intense. I don’t stutter when he licks his lips and clears his throat before he speaks to me. His voice is not Barry White’s, but it is smooth and deep, like a body of water that appears to be a placid river but is really a bottomless ocean. Yet, it is just a voice to me.

  I have my own muscles and my own body definition, so I don’t need to be concerned with his. Don’t need to think too much about how wide his palms are or how long his fingers are. There is no need to fall into his heavy eyelids because they are just eyes. I don’t have time for a man in my life, and even if I did, he is not my type.

  When I first started coming to his apartment, I waited for a woman to come onto the scene and start asking questions. Though nothing is happening between us, if I were his woman I would have so many questions that he’d have to write his responses down and spell check them. We look suspicious, and I can’t deny that. We look like we are having some sort of affair, and if I were his woman I would not stand for another woman hanging around him all the time.

  No woman comes, though, so I have come to a few conclusions of my own. “I thought you might be gay,” I finally say.

  “Because?”

  “Because I don’t see a woman coming and going.”

  “You come and go.”

  “I’m not your woman.”

  “That’s true,” he concedes with a tight smile. I have offended his masculinity, and his eyes tell me that he wants to fight. “I don’t see a man coming and going in and out of your place either. Does that mean you’re a lesbian?”

  “Oh, you gotta go there, right?”

  “You went there.”

  “Tit for tat?” I roll my eyes and walk out of the room. He catches up with me at the door.

  “I’m not gay, Lena, and I never have been.” I cannot say the same, so I don’t say anything. “Did you hear me?”


  “I heard you. I’m just not speaking to you right now. I’m being mad at you for the next little while.”

  “It’s like that?”

  “It’s like that.” I’m halfway up the stairs when I remember something important. “But if I were speaking to you, which I’m not, I would tell you not to forget that I’m using your car tomorrow afternoon. Gotta go back to the store. And in exchange, I will have stuffed salmon to seduce your palate and maybe a baked potato or two. But there will be no talking while we eat.”

  He laughs and shakes his head. Leans in his doorway and watches me disappear up the stairs. “Lena . . .”

  “No book, Aaron. No, no and no. Don’t ask me again.” I close my door and try to forget about seeing my face plastered all over the Internet.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three quarters of the way through my sentence I am transferred. Moved closer to my hometown in preparation for the release that I am sure is coming. Five years has never seemed so long, and now that my sentence is drawing to a close, I start remembering how to spell freedom. I have another year and a few insignificant months left.

  It starts over, only on a larger scale. I am the new kid on the block, the fish, and I find myself on the top bunk, but I don’t complain. Women are women, and they will be bitches regardless of where they are. The transition from maximum to medium security means nothing when hundreds of disgruntled vaginas are running the show. I share a cell with three other women and pretend that I am content. I have learned to ignore propositions to have my pussy sucked or to suck one, and I’m not shocked when the offers come my way. This is my life, and I am still waiting for it to be funny.

  I meet Anna, and together we come to the conclusion that we are the only sane ones in a world of madness. I live in B dorm, the medium security pod, and she lives two floors up, in D dorm, where the hardened criminals are housed. She is a menace to society but during meal times, when they mix us all up in one room like vegetable soup, she is just Anna.

  She tells me that she tried to do some Burning Bed shit, that she started a fire in the trailer home where she lived with her boyfriend and she used his sleeping and unaware body as kindling. She got twenty to life for thinking she could pull off a Farrah Fawcett and play the battered wife card. She has only been inside a little over a year, but it is starting to take its toll on her.

  Anna is ten years younger than I am, but she is deep. She likes to read and then discuss what she reads. She breathes life into the characters she reads about and reminds me that reading truly is an escape from reality. We bond over books. And then the bond grows deeper.

  I have said that prison is another world, and the same holds true from one prison to the next. This one is no different from the one I just left—inmates roaming around freely, doing whatever they want to do under the guise of darkness, and guards seeing what they want to see and turning their heads when they are tired of looking in one direction.

  Anna comes for me one night. With her long black hair and slanted half Cuban, half Taiwanese eyes, her small waist and high breasts, she comes for me. She takes me to the prison chapel and we sit close together, looking through a book that neither of us is really reading. There are others in the room with us, their voices like soft sighs and their throaty demands in the air around us, but we don’t turn our heads to search them out. We don’t peek into dark corners to see for ourselves the images created by our own minds. The chapel is the one place that guards don’t invade very often, if ever.

  The book is a prop and we both know it. We know Anna’s hand is resting softly on my thigh because it wants to be there and mine on hers because it cannot be anywhere else. I am not surprised when she reaches down and pulls her shirt over her head, shows me her breasts and wants me to touch them. I take my mouth there and love her the way I once liked to be loved, letting myself be bold and hungry. The dominant one. The man.

  She kisses me with everything she has, and I take her tongue deep into my mouth. It is different; it tastes and feels different, but not wrong. I have been without taste, touch and stimulation for so long that this is not wrong. Soft feels luxurious and wet feels like fire. We cannot touch fast enough or taste long enough. We cannot be close enough. Our kisses turn rougher and deeper, our orgasms cut like knives and make us both tremble long after they have subsided.

  We know we want to do this again and we know we don’t want to do it again with anyone else. This is the beginning of our affair. The moment we become lovers and chart our own path, which is the path of least resistance. Abstaining from sex is gruesome to one who knows the pleasure of it. We accept that we have loved men and that we still crave the fullness that only they can provide, but what we do is enough. More than enough in this time and place. We explore and learn each other’s bodies the way we know our own bodies, and we make it a beautiful experience.

  I am ignorant of the rules, though, and my relationship with Anna means that I will have to pay. I learn about the woman Anna avoids, the one she rejects and doesn’t desire, out on the yard. She stares at me—hard. Makes her presence known and her intentions clear. She wants Anna, and I am in the way. I ignore her, and it is the second worst mistake I have ever made. Sending myself to prison is the first.

  Guards can’t come fast enough to prevent what is happening. I hold my breath and pray they come soon. I wish for them to save me from the crazy bitch I am faced with and then to save me from myself. Everything happens in slow motion, which slows their progress even more. In my mind, the seconds tick by, a minute seems like an hour and an hour is a lifetime.

  My stomach sinks in on itself as I fall back and away from the blade she thrusts at me. I hear the wind her arm leaves behind; she wants to cut me so badly. She swings and swipes at the air with the blade and takes ten years off my life each time, until I think I am a newborn baby again. I can see myself falling to the ground in a puddle of blood, dying in prison and leaving my daughter an orphan in the truest sense of the word.

  I don’t like the image and it fuels me. We circle each other warily, and she tells me that I am a dead black bitch, that I should’ve stayed in my place and left her woman alone. I tell her to suck my black pussy and then I say I think that is what her problem is. She wants to suck it.

  That makes her mad and stupid at the same time. She flings the blade to the ground and charges me. Suddenly we are just women again, slapping and scratching, gouging and biting. She slams my head into the concrete over and over again and I see stars. I pull her hair so hard that her eyes are slits in her face. We roll and I do some slamming of my own. I trap her cheek between my teeth and draw blood, almost take a chunk of flesh with me as I retreat. She screams like a fallen warrior, and an arm flings out to pat the concrete around us.

  She finds her blade and brings it between us. We struggle over possession of it, and neither of us is the victor. I end up with a neat surface cut that stretches down my side, and she ends up with a gut full of metal. The blade ends up exactly where she wanted it to end up, except it is her intestines that are visible to the naked eye, instead of mine.

  She spends six hours in emergency surgery, she comes out stitched up and humbled, and I am awarded another four years in prison for my trouble. They say I have committed the offense of assault first degree with a deadly weapon, but I say I have defended myself. It does not matter that the weapon is hers. What matters is that her blood is on my hands. Word on the block is that her heart stopped beating during surgery but that she was revived, which means I have narrowly avoided another murder charge and possibly, life in prison.

  I spend a month in the hole, where the food is not as good this time around, and then I come out labeled a dangerous felon and in it for the long haul. Anna no longer has to sneak down to B dorm to visit me because I am in D dorm with her. We go on like nothing has changed, still a couple.

  Anna comes with me to the chapel, but we are not here to make love. I am here to throw myself on someone’s mercy. I walk up to the altar and fall
to my knees, fold my hands under my chin and pray so damn hard that God has no choice but to hear me. I pray for everything I can think of. I pray for Beige, for my mother, for Vicky. For starving children all over the world, for Yo-Yo, for Patty. Everything and everybody.

  And then I pray for the salvation of my soul. I admit to God that holding that blade struck a chord deep inside of me and that at some point, holding it felt good. I ask Him to remove the taste of violence from my mouth and the stench of blood from my nostrils.

  I ask him to please find a way to let me know that my grandmother is burning in hell, because if she isn’t, none of this is worth it.

  “I have groceries in the car,” I say helplessly, looking over my shoulder to where Aaron’s car is parked at the curb. My face tells the stranger in front of me that this isn’t on my agenda for the day, stepping inside and chatting like milk won’t sour and cheese won’t melt. This is Aaron’s fault, and I will be sure to slap him when I get back home. I glance down at my wideleg jeans and rainbow-printed dashiki, back up at his sharply creased slacks and tasteful tie, and step inside the lobby of the Sentinel newspaper. I don’t want to, but not doing so means I have to be unnecessarily rude.

  I remember the CD in my hand and thrust it toward the stranger who is so hospitable.

  “I’m supposed to drop this off to Don Hughes.”

  “I’m Don,” he says and smiles at me. “Aaron told me to expect you this afternoon. Let’s go in my office.”

  He does most of his work from home, Aaron does, and this is why I am following a man named Don to his office, even though I have no idea why. I take in my surroundings as I go, glance at the motivational posters framed on the walls and stick my finger in the soil of a potted plant desperately in need of watering. It will die soon if it doesn’t receive some much-needed attention. “Your plants are dying,” I say.

  He drops into a captain’s chair behind a massive desk and reaches for the telephone. “Darla,” he says into the receiver, “the plants are dying. See about some water for them, would you?” Then he is motioning for me to take a seat and grinning from ear to ear. “I’m Don Hughes. Did I say that already?”